Large data centers that are used to transmit customer information, credit card information or the like inherently have many problems. For most of the data centers, the biggest issues are lack of security, decreased quality of performance, scalability issues, and version flexibility to support application sharing among customers (multi-tenancy).
As the number of customers of a data center increases or if a data center has multiple locations serving multiple customers, security may decrease. Security issues are of great importance for these data centers that serve multiple clients (i.e., banking and financial institutions), as they may have competitors who are generally “hostile” toward one another. It is therefore necessary to provide a secure connection that allows client information to be sent through these data centers without compromising the security of the information.
With data centers being spread over multiple locations, dramatic decreases in guaranteed performance may also occur. It is necessary for a system in which shared use of a data center in multiple locations does not diminish performance.
A further issue with respect to the larger data centers is the problem of adaptability. In an application-sharing model, small customers share the same application. As customer use grows, the data centers must then be able to adapt to this increased growth. Unless adaptation can take place, the economies of scale will not allow for decreased costs. However, if the data centers are able to expand easily, the sharing of the applications becomes much more cost effective.
Version flexibility may also become a large problem because various customers may have different software version requirements, thus requiring multiple versions to be in use simultaneously. The architecture must be able to adapt to a variety of customer versions or the sharing of applications cannot work well. Additionally, the upgrade policy within the data centers must be flexible enough to allow client software to remain intact while server software is upgraded because it is unreasonable to demand a synchronous upgrade of all client software in the ASP setting.
Various software applications, including CORBA® (a registered trademark of Object Management Group, Inc), Microsoft COM/DCOM, ENTERPRISE JAVABEANS® (a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc), and others, have attempted to address these problems. But none of these applications have been able to satisfactorily address all problems.
Thus a need exists for a new software architecture that avoids those shortcomings, and allows information to be transmitted securely between a client and a server.